At what age did you know what you wanted to do for a living?

[DBT85]

At 25 I'm exactly where I wanted to be personally. I've been married 9 months, live in a mortgaged 3 bed semi in the green belt just inside the M25 and am earning enough even before overtime to live happily.

But professionally I still have no idea what I want to do with my life. I never have. The wife wanted to be a nurse from like 15 and so now is a nurse doing very well. My brother wanted to be a software developer at 14 and is now (at 21) the WebDev Manager at a very successful travel agents.

I'm not looking for advice on what to do as obviously you don’t know what I do now or what I’m capable of, but when did you realise what you wanted to do or what field you wanted to work in?

 

[DBT85]

Initial polls suggest that I'm not the only one, hurrah!

When I was younger (13) I was interested in programming and played around with VB a bit but it never went anywhere, I've also done some small 3D work for Ads for those crappy DVDs for a fiver that Woolies used to sell. I don’t think it needed to be done in 3D but I could do what they wanted and they couldn’t so there you go lol.

At school I just did enough to not get into trouble coming out with 7 B's, 3 C's and an E (French). Looking back i know i never really tried, i never put ANY effort into anything. I then carried on at 6th form with A Level Physics, Maths and IT. Maths I dropped out because I was learning stuff I should have known at GCSE and so couldn't wrap my head around it all at once (plus I wanted to play football with my mates who were free when I had maths ><). Eventually I came out with an E in IT and Physics despite actually trying in the final year of Physics I still couldn’t do enough to get a decent grade.

6 days after my final A Level exam I started work at a TV Broadcaster as a Transmission Controller. Essentially I keep the station on air. We are primarily a Live Business News channel (not Bloomberg) so when there's lots going on its great fun. With the new automation system being windows based (old one was dos) its all been tested and patched properly so you don't have to fight it all day to keep everything on an even keel. Because of that, the job is now mostly boring as sin which is a great shame as I used to love it essentially when it all went wrong ><.

As I said, I cant complain about the money, its always nice to have more but salaried is enough to live on happily and in the last 2 FY I've earnt about an extra 25-30% on top of that thanks to the overtime opportunities available (did quite a lot of 300hr months).

I just sit here, bored off my bits, and can’t help think that I could be doing something better or more interesting. I just don’t know what!

I know that with the mortgage I can't go off to Uni to study anything (if I knew what I wanted) and with the shifts I do commiting to a night school type thing is out which would leave distance learning. But on the basis that I hated school and was never really any good at writing stuff up, I've no idea if that would work either.

Glad its not just me though

 

[DBT85]

34 now and still don’t know what I want to do!

Drifted into IT many years ago and am now stuck, if I changed jobs now I will have to start from the bottom which means taking a large pay cut which I can't afford as I have 3 children and a better half to support.

This is my worry. I could afford to take a pay cut but not much or if it was substantial it would have to be short term while I was training or something. There aren't many jobs that i'm aware of that you can just walk in with no previous and be earning nearly 30k within 12 months. If money wern't an issue i'd love to go off to uni and learn something as it wouldn't matter if it never worked out but obviously in the real world its not that easy.

 

[DBT85]

Train or get further education part time...

I'm not saying it is easy but it is more feasible - I'm in the same boat, wanted to study maths but also have a well paid job it would be silly to leave at the moment so I've opted to study part time with the OU.

its something i have considered, but because i dont know what i want to do I'd rather not just do something for the sake of doing it. Especially since It'll end up costing 3k or whatever. In addition, i was never very good at that kind of learning. Put me in the room with whatever you want me do however and i'll have it licked doubletime.

I'm interested in Photography (D80 and proud) but seem to lack that creative vigour to actually make something special appear on my screen. I'm interested in software development which is probably most up my alley as I love problem solving but after wasting 2 years doing an A Leven in IT (which was uttery the wrong area of computing for me) maybe i'm concerned that it's not going to be what i am after.

A couple of years ago i wanted to play around and make calculator that would add up timecode (HH:MM:SS:FF). While i didnt know how to make it in code, i wrote up the full design including the math behind it and once my brother shed taught me the code it all worked perfectly first time. My brother had done something similar a few years earlier and had to keep patching it because his logical maths was pants.